Monday, 25 January 2016

What exactly is it that makes a Corbynista tick? It’s a
question I’ve been pondering in recent months, while trying to enter into some
kind of debate on social media with the avowed fans of Labour’s leftwing
leader.

For those of us who remember the political turmoil of the
1980s, it is perhaps too easy to dismiss Corbyn’s followers as being stuck in a
timewarp. With all the talk of nationalisation, unilateral nuclear disarmament
and even the ownership of the Falklands, are we dealing with renegades who are
simply refighting the lost battles of a bygone era?

I’ve challenged myself to be a little more open-minded.
After all, we’re told that Corbyn has inspired a new generation of activists.
If you’re 19 or 20 today, you would have been born around the time of Tony
Blair’s first election victory. Ken
Livingstone’s Greater London Council and the Trotskyist take-over of Liverpool would
seem as much a part of the history books as the Korean War appears to me.

It’s hard to know whether the people I’m encountering on
Facebook pages and Twitter are truly representative of those who have joined or
rejoined the Labour Party in the wake of the Corbyn leadership campaign. They
are, however, the people who vocally and publicly support the MP for Islington
North and the only sample I can really access.

Here’s my assessment.

The Corbynistas are
cynics

Although they ostensibly champion a ‘new’ politics,
supporters of Corbyn appear to be profoundly cynical. They distrust the opinions of anyone outside
their political and cultural milieu, refuse to believe in polling evidence (see
below) and often describe the people who voted Tory in the 2015 election as
‘idiots’.

They seem to dislike
every Labour government apart from the one in 1945

Much of the venom emanating from the Corbyn wing of the
party is directed at Blair and Brown, who are described as ‘neo-liberals’. The only Labour government these people will
ever defend is the Attlee administration of 1945, although many of the
commentators have little historical perspective and don’t understand that this
was actually a government of compromise and pragmatism. One of my favourite questions to ask of the Corbynistas is
which government over the past fifty years they feel has done the most good.
Rather than give the obvious answer of the Blair/Brown administrations, some
prefer to demonstrate their remarkable mathematical prowess by opting once
again for Attlee.

They are attracted by
conspiracy theories

Corbyn’s advocates dismiss the TV, radio, newspapers and websites
people enjoy as ‘mainstream media’ or ‘MSM’. In common with so-called
‘birthers’, ‘truthers’ and other conspiracists on the fringes of the web, they
use the term disparagingly to describe what they believe to be a destructive
force which ‘brainwashes’ people into supporting the status quo and received
wisdom. The ‘Bitterite’ faction of former Blair supporters is aiding the media
in its onslaught against Corbyn and should be ashamed of itself.

They are obsessed
with Iraq and Blair’s foreign policy

It is taken for granted that the man they call ‘Bliar’ took
us into unwanted ‘foreign wars’. No distinction is made between, say, the
mission to save Muslims from Serbian genocide in Kosovo and the ill-fated
expedition to topple Saddam Hussein. The Corbynistas are people who oppose all
use of British military force, regardless of circumstance. It hasn’t yet dawned
on them that those voting for the first time in 2020 would have been babies at
the time of the Iraq conflict.

They have limited
understanding of polling

Nothing undermines the case for Corbyn like opinion polls,
which show him to be desperately unpopular. The kneejerk reaction of Jez’s fans
is to laugh at anyone stupid enough to believe in polling evidence. After all,
they claim, the polls have been proved wrong time and time again and are
controlled by powerful interests. (Actually, the polls have only been wrong in
the way they’ve tended to overestimate
support for Labour, so almost certainly the situation is even more dire today
than headline figures suggest.)

They champion the
views of Labour members over those of Labour voters

Corbyn won 60% of the vote in the leadership election and
therefore has an overwhelming mandate, in the eyes of his supporters, to
reshape the party in his image. Given that those voting are entirely self-selecting,
we should presumably be equally impressed that the Pope has the blessing of a
large number of Cardinals and not worry too much if Roman Catholicism is in
decline in the outside world. The opinions of prospective Labour voters and supporters are
given much less prominence in the Corbyn worldview. Those who voted Conservative in 2015 are
often deemed to be stupid and the assumption is that they must now surely be regretting
their idiocy. Those who voted Green were clearly rejecting the neo-liberalism
of the ‘Tory Lite’ Labour Party by voting for a left-wing party. And those who
voted UKIP were also rejecting the neo-liberalism of the ‘Tory Lite’ Labour
Party, by... err... voting for a right-wing party.

My conclusions are that the supporters of Corbyn are trapped
in a closed loop of political rhetoric and quasi-religious dogma. Despite the
claim to have brought in a new generation of activists, discussion online seems
to be dominated by those who have been in the Labour Party for some time. Many
left the Labour Party when Blair was first elected leader, some left after he
became Prime Minister and even more quit as a protest over Iraq. They are now
back and make the entirely disingenuous claim to have the best interests of the
Party at heart.

Those moderates in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who are
thinking of playing the long game and waiting for Corbyn’s inadequacies to
become apparent, should be very cautious. I see no evidence that any of the people
in these online forums would be swayed by even a catastrophic electoral defeat.
As is the way with most religious movements, the failure would be explained in
the context of the dogma. Corbyn was never given a chance. He had been
undermined by the Blairites and the MSM. Perhaps he had even been forced to
sell out or water down his true left-wing principles.

This is the biggest possible mess and I’m afraid there is
going to be no easy way out.